Alzheimer’s-like changes affect brains of elderly long before symptoms appear

Older adults with evidence of amyloid in the brain but no clinical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease have structures in the brain that don’t communicate readily with each other, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The findings, published in Biological Psychiatry, may be yet another indicator that Alzheimer’s damage to the brain begins to occur long before there are clinical symptoms of the disease.

Using brain-mapping techniques, first author Yvette I. Sheline, MD, and colleagues found that key brain structures don’t connect as efficiently in brains where positron emission tomography (PET) scans revealed the abnormal presence of the amyloid protein...

Alzheimer’s-like changes affect brains of elderly long before symptoms appear | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

Alison Goate appointed Director of Hope Center for Neurological Disorders

Goate appointed director of Hope Center for Neurological Disorders | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

Drs. Alan Schwartz and Randall Bateman, members of DBBS, to be honored by Academy of Science of St. Louis

Three medical school faculty to be honored by Academy of Science of St. Louis | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis

Daniel Link, DBBS faculty member recognized as Outstanding Mentor

Outstanding mentoring recognized Newsroom Washington University in St. Louis

Following his instincts: Sleckman's intuition pays off in teaching, research

Barry Sleckman, MD, PhD, was a busy young entrepreneur and disaffected commuter college student when his life began taking a sudden series of unexpected turns in the late 1970s. One weekend, a close friend seeking a job with the state police urged Sleckman, now the Conan Professor and director of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, to come to the civil service exam with him to boost his morale and ease his worries. Sleckman agreed to do it, but when they arrived at the exam, Sleckman found out the only way he could go in was if he took the exam, too.

"I passed the test, the medical and physical fitness exams, the psychiatric and background checks, and, three months later, they called me back and said, ‘Congratulations, you're a member of the 95th New Jersey State Police Academy,’" he says.

Sleckman took a look at the golf-club repair business he founded at age 12 and ran from his parents' basement (with three employees) and at the busy work in college that kept cluttering up his schedule and decided that perhaps destiny was calling.

He knew he was mistaken before a year had passed. But his eight-month stint in the state police left him fascinated by the medical work he'd seen paramedics perform and wondering if he could become a doctor....

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Checking Cancer: Longmore pursues winning goals, on and of the ice

He's Canadian, he plays hockey and he has had a brush with Olympic glory. That's Gregory D. Longmore, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology.

No, he didn't play on an Olympic hockey team. Longmore's ice time is more recreational than professional, but he once conducted scientific research that cast new light on the athletic prowess of an Olympic gold medalist.

In the early 1990s as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Longmore found a genetic mutation in a red blood cell hormone receptor that caused mice to produce extra red blood cells. Then, while in Finland to give a scientific presentation, he met a clinician who happened to be studying an extended family with many members having high red blood cell counts.

One of them was Eero Mäntyranta, a famous Finnish athlete who won a dozen or so Olympic and world championship medals in cross-country skiing in the 1960s. Longmore's genetic discovery intrigued the clinician and a geneticist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, who decided they should look at the same gene in the skier and his kin...

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Kharasch named vice chancellor for research

Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, the Russell D. and Mary B. Shelden Professor of Anesthesiology and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, has been appointed vice chancellor for research at Washington University in St. Louis, effective April 5. He had served as interim vice chancellor since July 2009.

Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton made the announcement.

“I want to thank Ed Macias and the search committee, chaired by Professor Deanna Barch, for their efforts," Wrighton says. “After several months of outstanding work in an interim role, we are pleased that Evan Kharasch has accepted this position permanently and know that he will serve and lead with distinction.”

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